Sam Bankman-Fried reportedly ran a multi-billion dollar fraud in the Bahamas in 2021. He supported “progressive” causes and appeared on the covers of publications. And he evaded authorities until his actions went too far to ignore.
According to a report, Conservative activist Peter Schiff owned a bank in Puerto Rico. Schiff, an economist, advocates for less tax and regulation. An enormous “tax evasion” probe against Schiff conducted by the U.S. and four other nations yielded no criminal findings.
Authorities released news of the inquiry to the press, and the negative publicity was cited for taking the bank from Schiff.
The head of the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal enforcement division appeared in Puerto Rico for a news conference in which he implied that the IRS closed Schiff’s bank for money laundering and tax evasion. But it wasn’t true.
A Puerto Rican regulatory agency closed Schiff’s Euro Pacific Bank (EPB) because it was allegedly insolvent. The board of directors claimed that the bank would be unable to repay its clients in the event of a run on the bank.
But reports revealed that Schiff’s bank catered to cautious clientele who valued the safety of their funds above interest income. The bank didn’t make loans from deposits and relied on transaction fees for revenue.
EPB’s cash reserves were more than adequate to cover all depositor balances, as was subsequently confirmed by Puerto Rico’s financial watchdog. Still, Puerto Rico placed it under receivership. Over $65 million in deposits from the bank’s thousands of clients remain unreturned.
Schiff publicly foretold the adversity of cryptocurrencies and predicted the 2008 economic crash.
Schiff told CNBC viewers in 2006 that the U.S. economy would suffer from excessive spending and borrowing and inadequate productivity and savings. Americans would likely reduce their spending and put that money toward rebuilding their savings. You need a recession to fix the economy’s imbalances when consumption accounts for 70% of activity.
Schiff was also worried that the government couldn’t be trusted to act morally.
